


The Trickery of Time Zones and Sleep schedules

by Aproclivity



Series: Forces of Nature [2]
Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: Alex Reagan makes bad decisions, Alex and a sense of self preservation is the OTP that will never happen, F/M, I'm still annoyed that we never actually got Strand's finding out Alex went to Turkey so here it is, Missing Scene, Strand's gotta Strand, these two idiots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-25
Updated: 2019-01-25
Packaged: 2019-10-16 05:53:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17543954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aproclivity/pseuds/Aproclivity
Summary: Alex Reagan actually went to Turkey to meet admitted and convicted murderer Simon Reese without telling Strand before hand. And then he finds out over a phone call because Alex forgets how time zones work. A missing scene for 303. Spoilers: it goes over just about as well as you'd expect.





	The Trickery of Time Zones and Sleep schedules

**Author's Note:**

> This is the conversation that was alluded to in my other fic "Your mother thinks we're dating and has been for over a year." (And has been sitting in my files since then honestly.) Because of the shared universe it is tagged with the same "Forces of Nature" universe. You don't need to know the story at all to read this! Thanks to Nerdyvixen for cheerleading me as always.

The ride from the small shack in the middle of nowhere to the cheapest hotel where she was staying was definitely more than twenty minutes. If Alex was honest, those twenty minutes had been spent in a line of city traffic that had only ended with them going a few blocks. It wasn’t enough time to get out to that shack, but somewhere along the way, Alex had made the decision that there were certain things that were worth protecting from her show. Whatever the Horn of Tiamat was or wasn’t, she wasn’t going to leave a clue for Warren to follow, even though she knew Simon and his people were probably gone from the shack well before she’d even made it past the first turn off the street.

She was going to chose to ignore the fact that Simon had people now. It was strange, really, that the boy (man?) who had single-handedly killed so many Brothers of the Mount now had a cult of his own The kids (and they were all kids, and that made Alex feel as old as Strand) made Alex wonder if they had been like Simon, if he’d rescued them before things got as bad for them as they did for Sebastian and Katie Yi and even Simon himself. It made a lot of sense in a way.

When she looked up from the window, she saw Elijah studying her intently. “Everything okay, Ms. Reagan?” he asked, his voice soft and lightly accented, and Alex was suddenly reminded of how this wasn’t just the American people dealing with this: it affected kids all over the world. “Are you too hot?”

“No, Elijah.” Alex kept her voice soft, her empathy forming silk around the sharpness she wanted to insert into it. “I’m fine. Thank you.” She wanted to ask him questions--she was burning with the need to ask him questions, honestly--but for now, Alex kept them wrapped up. He hadn’t answered her questions on the way there, and the last thing she wanted was to end up sitting on the side of the road without anyone nearby to get her. On the way there, it was different--there was no way Simon wasn’t going to get her there after he’d left that message begging for her to come. (He had begged. There was no doubt of that,) But Simon wasn’t expecting her to return home yet, so anything could happen.

Alex Reagan really, really, really hated how she need to think about that now.

When he didn’t speak to her again, Alex found herself just staring at the photo of the Horn, watching the symbols as though she expected them to move. She could have sworn that she almost felt them move beneath her fingertips when she’d touched them; the electric current still lingered in her fingers and arms, almost making her hands feel as if they belonged to someone entirely different than herself. It was more than a little disconcerting, and while she was normally someone who could be counted on for putting her chin in her hand or her fingers near her mouth, she now hoad a nearly pathological need _not_ to do it. Yes, she knew what Strand would say about that, about all of it, but she still wasn’t going to do it until she thoroughly scrubbed her hands and found some sanitizer to go on both her hands and her phone.

The Horn didn’t feel like it would hurt her--that was the overwhelming sense of what lay below the current, and she’d known then that Simon wasn’t lying about how important it was that she be the one here for this, that _she_ was the one who touched it. Thinking of it brought the weird rushing sound to her ears again, and Alex needed to close her eyes against the sense of it, the smell of salt and heated sand that threatened to overwhelm her once more. There’d been Simon there, back in the shack, guiding her so that she wouldn’t be lost in it. Of course, that was irrational as hell, but she suspected that was why he’d kept talking--and, more than that, why he’d kept _her_ talking all through the times she held the fragile, ancient parchment between her fingers.

But here, in the quiet swaying of the car as it rocked over the bumps in the country road, there wasn’t a Simon--there wasn’t even music playing on the radio. Alex found herself needing to put her phone down as the designs sway across her vision. Some thirty hours had passed since she’d even attempted to sleep, and that wasn’t counting the massive sleep debt she’d incurred over the last three years. With the warmth of the car and the need to close her eyes in order to make her head not succumb to dizziness, Alex found herself dozing off faster than she had in a good long time, even with her fingers still buzzing from before.

The boat on which she was perched rocked and rode the choppy waves, and she felt her stomach pitch as her nails dug into the worn wood. All around her was a musical language she didn’t know that sounded not quite like anything she’d heard before. The closest things she could imagine were some of the words that had come from Strand’s mouth before, and the voices singing and speaking to her now inspired that same sort of feeling of safety that she would, if asked about, deny completely.

But there was a reason she listened to him talk when she couldn’t sleep and when she felt like the shadows in her bedroom where demons looming and leering over her.

Though the rest of their words didn’t make any sense, there was one that did: it was her name, spoken over and over, gently repeated at first before becoming more insistent. The rolling of the water below the boat came more violently now. It threatened to upset her from the wood--and now she noticed the sacred geometry etched there, pinwheeling out in familiar patterns as far as she could see. Suddenly, the sensation around her shoulders hurt, and Alex woke with a jolt, staring into Elijah’s face, pale beneath his tan skin, and the real fear there in his eyes. “Alex? Alex!”

Feeling as if she’d woken from running a marathon wasn’t a new sensation for Alex, but today the burning wasn’t just in her legs or in the tension-taut muscles of her shoulders and across her spine. The deep, weighty ache spread across her whole body, and even though she had jerked upwards when she’d woken, her head felt too heavy, and the bones of her spine felt too fragile to support it. Letting her eyes focus on Elijah’s lips was easier for Alex to focus on than the obsessive look in his eyes, but it still took her a moment to realize his full lips were forming _Simon will kill me if something happened to you, Alex._ It was, in its own way, slightly reassuring, but it was also not reassuring at all. The last thing Alex ever wanted was to have a killer kill someone for her, or to protect her, or whatever the hell was happening. With the weight of the new sensation sitting heavily in her chest, she looked out the window and realized she was back at the hotel.

Given the trip out to the shack happened in the mid-morning and judging by the way the sun was low on the horizon and the way the shadows of the building slipped their way towards her, Alex suspected she’d been asleep for somewhere around four hours. If only she _felt_ like it. With a quick smile, Alex clutched her dead phone in her hands (when had that happened?!) and then grabbed her bag and nodded to Elijah. “I’m fine. Thank you for the ride. Tell Simon I’m back here safe.” The words were too light and quick, but she wanted to get into some place with a locked door.

Even if locks didn’t matter to Simon.

But more than that, she wanted to talk to Richard. Even more than that. With the calming voices from her dreams swimming back to her, Alex felt like she _needed_ to hear his voice, even if it was just over the phone from six thousand miles away.

The idea of times zones, how far away she was, and the fact that she’d not wanted Strand to know where she’d gone until she’d gotten back weren’t things she’d at all thought about. More than that, she couldn’t quite tell that it was likely the middle of the night back home. Even when she’d been at her worst, even when the nightmares had threatened to swallow her, she’d never felt the blind need to reach out to Richard, even it was just to make certain that he was all right.

She should have thought of it, of Seattle being hours away, but given how little she’d slept (or at least, felt like she’d _not_ slept), it seemed like it should have been in the early evening there, too. Knowing Strand was probably at the office, she decided that it was safe to give him a call--the she _should_ give him a call because she was holding a picture of what Simon said was the Horn of Tiamat--the Horn that was probably a rather large piece of _everything_ if they could figure out its meaning.

 

And she wasn’t thinking about the desperate need inside of her to hear Richard say her name, even if it was with that firm annoyance she expected from him. That, in and of itself, was reassuring. The world could end, and it could be her fault, but Richard would still sound like that to her, even if demons nipped at their heels and the sea rose up to meet the path before them.

Dialing Richard’s number from memory, she waited for him to pick up.

Despite what he may have told Alex on more than one occasion, he had a problem similar to hers most nights. The brain that was such a boon during the day was an enemy in the dark, his thoughts marching steadfastly back and forth with all the precision of a drill team. The contents of his thought had varied since he’d lost his wife, but the fact that the dreaded cycle kept moving onward was the one constant to go with the skepticism and the never-dulling sharpness in his chest.

This wasn’t the first time the concern had to do with Alex, of course. It had started even before he had pushed himself into willful ignorance regarding her appearance as her insomnia leached her spark and vitality. But there had been the messages from Coralee to decipher, the search for her that superseded everything else--he could be just as single-minded about answers as Alex. Of course, now he knew how she was doing, and he spent more nights than not trying to not feel guilty about it. 

The worst were the nights when the day’s interaction with Alex had gone badly. Those nights were haunting.

Tonight’s brain had Alex written all over it. It had been thirty-seven hours since he’d last heard from her. That, in and of itself, wasn’t entirely unusually--she normally only texted when she had updates or--he thought ruefully--if she was ‘worried about him.’ But one thing she didn’t do was ignore him when he texted her.

The last text sat on his phone with the gray ‘delivered’ under it, but she hadn’t responded.

A casual phone call to the studio had informed him that Alex wasn’t in, which was also unusual. Most of the the time lately, if she was out investigating something, she would text him what she found. But the intern--and apparently by extension Nic--seemed unwilling or unable to actually tell him where the hell Alex actually was. Given the nature of the mess they were embroiled in, it wasn’t surprising or out of character to worry, he’d decided. It was simply an extension of their present friendly relationship. It wasn’t as if Alex was, by nature, impulsive or reckless or anything like that. Smiling wryly, he reminded himself to inform her of that the next time she did endeavor to return his text or call him.

He turned over in his bed, intent on trying to find _some_ sleep, when his phone rang. At nearly two a.m., the possibilities of who or what it might be were generally simple: a wrong number, a nuisance call (including any cult-like nonsense from someone who might use the fact that this was the longest he’d gone without changing his personal cell phone number to their advantage, even if he’d had reason for it), or an emergency. The first two he would have been fine with missing, deleting any messages left unheard, but the thought of the last was enough for him to scramble for both his phone and his wire-rimmed glasses on the nightstand.

Alex’s name in his phone directory had been changed multiple times over the past two-odd years. It started out “Ms. Reagan” and morphed various times into “do not answer” and “Alex Reagan.” Now, it was simply “Alex” in order to place it at the top of the address book. (Ruby remained the only private person’s cell number he’d bothered to learn by heart, but even that was because of convenience--if he lost his phone or needed to change his number quickly, his assistant would be the one responsible for adding the rest of the directory into the new device. It would be impossible for him to direct her to do it if he couldn’t call her without it.)

The screen glowed “Alex,” and immediately, his finger was on the ‘accept call’ button, jerking the phone to his ear before he had even dragged his finger away. “What’s wrong.” The words weren’t a question but a statement; if Alex Reagan was calling him at two a.m., there was a reason for it, and he knew her well enough to know that the reason would never be something as simple as her insomnia, not now. Not that she’d called him with it before--he knew how hard she tried to hide it from him. No, if she was calling, something was wrong.

Alex had been in the middle of staring at the picture of the Horn of Tiamat once again. It had been something that she’d done the entire journey back, after she’d made certain that the recording of Simon was intact. While she didn’t want to email the picture to Nic and Strand (at least, not while she was eighteen hours away, counting customs), she did upload her recording to Google so that if something did happen to her, then…

Well, then at least Nic would have the footage and would know what had happened. Hopefully he’d put aside all the Tanis nonsense and help fix what she couldn’t.

Despite how Strand had maintained that nothing had happened or would happen--it had been a year, and they weren’t dead yet--Alex had been bound and determined to stop this by any means necessary. Maybe that was why she’d been so damned insistent she go to Turkey. In the end, it had taken booking a non-refundable ticket with her savings and putting a non-refundable hotel on the PNWS charge card that had made Nic even agree to let her go in the first place. Of course, it had still taken over an hour of them shouting back and forth at each other before it had even happened.

Alex didn't tell Strand. She knew that he'd want to go and there was no way the show was paying for his ticket if it wouldn't pay for hers, and even though Simon hadn't said not to bring Richard, she expected that if Simon wanted him to come along he would have mentioned it. So, she didn't want there to be another fight when she was perfectly willing and able to investigate this on her own. 

The way he sounded on the phone surprised Alex, and she just blinked at it for a moment, wondering if Nic had told Strand even though he said that he wouldn't. Then her eyes flicked to the clock on the hotel desk and back to the phone and she just let out a loud groan. "God, I'm sorry Richard. I'm fine, I just messed up the time difference." Which she realized was probably the stupidest thing she should have said and slapped a hand to her forehead after it. She should have just told him that she meant to text him something and would call him in the morning. _Damn it._

 

If there was one thing that nearly three years of exposure to Alex Reagan has taught him, it's how she sounds when she’s keeping something from him. He had attempted to ignore it before but right now he couldn’t. There was something like ice in his stomach at the moment and he was sitting up with his phone in one hand and his glasses in the other. 

Time difference, that was what Alex had said, what she didn’t mean to say which meant that she was overly excited about something and also overly exhausted. Richard didn’t even bother to try and keep the annoyance, anger and near disbelief out of his voice as he flatly asked a question that wasn’t really a question at all. “Where are you?” There may have been an unspoken ‘tell me you did not do the stupid thing I suspect you did’ in that tone that he didn’t bother to try and hide. It was all too easy for him to put what had happened, and what was happening together. The only left was whether or not Alex actually admitted it. 

At least she didn’t even consider trying to lie about this. The exhaustion and adrenaline were fighting a battle within her, even after the hours she’d been driven back to the city. (Yes, she would lie about where she was on the show and about how long it had been. The horn of Tiamat, even if it was fake was too valuable for her not to do it, especially when she knew that Warren was definitely listening to the show. )

Probably personally at this point but she tried not to think about it. She really didn’t want him to be amused or anything else but the moniker that Alex had assigned him before they knew how dangerous he was. Richard and Nic already gave her enough shit for it. 

“Turkey.” The word is a drawn out sigh before she added to it, “of course I went to Turkey. I couldn’t not come to Turkey,” Alex tried to explain with a hitch of desperation in her tone, “not with my gut telling me that I needed too.”

If there was precisely the wrong thing to say to Richard Strand with his degrees in skepticism and being an asshole. His voice was sharp and biting and there was the angry laugh that was so different from the real chuffing one that he gave her almost against his will. “Your _gut_ , Alex? Your _intuition?_ Can you honestly think of anyone who is less likely to exhibit that sort of thing than you even if it did somehow miraculously somehow existed?!”

“That is not fair!” Alex protested quickly, scowling at him over the phone. “You know I’m actually getting pretty sick of both you and Nic acting like I’m fucking crazy with my theories when in a few weeks or however long I’m proven right. And half the time not only am I proven right but also that you knew the entire time and just attempted to gaslight me or something!”

“Are you being serious right now?” The level of anger in his voice was enough that Alex more than half-expected him to hang up on her. Wouldn’t be the first time and it probably wouldn’t be the last. “You think you’ve been proven right?! Give me one example. Just one Alex!”

“Just one? You mean besides the black tapes being connected as you have been denying for years?! The black tapes that you picked and curated to show me? You mean right like the time when I said that the order of the cenephos was after us and then Coralee needed to show up with a van? Or how I was right that she was alive?”

“Enough!” The word was a roar, sharp and jagged with something that Alex would only realize later, and would spend the nineteen hours of her flight thinking about. “How many times, Alex?! How many times are you just going to be stupid and reckless and throw yourself into situations like this one? How many times are you going to accept the calls of an admitted mass murderer who has escaped from an insane asylum and is obsessed with you? How the hell could you just rise to his bait and fly halfway across the world in order to meet with him?!” He was covering that first tone with the hiss of his furious voice again, and Alex couldn’t stop herself from responding. 

“The fucking Horn of Tiamat. Simon wanted me because he had the horn of Tiamat!” The words were practically shouted back at him, and any idea of discretion (not that Alex was particularly good at that anyway) was lost in the thin walls of the hotel. 

“What?” The word was soft and Alex waited for him to respond with something else, the moment passing for a long enough time that she got to twenty in her counting so she didn’t yell again. 

“Richard?” She finally asked, wondering if he’d hung up on her at last even though a quick glance told her that the call was still running. 

“Are you sure?” Was what he responded instead of anything else, and it was low enough that Alex needed to strain to hear it. 

“Simon says so. He said he got it from the Vatican vaults. I think that’s why he asked for me. That he wanted me to touch it to like not just see it but to put my hands on it.” 

“Simon is insane and obsessed with you.” He began, but most of the heat was out of the quiet of his voice. “He’s lying.”

“I honestly don’t think he is. I think he believes that it is what he said it was. I have pictures but I don’t want them to be in the wind yet. Not until I get home. Besides, when I touched it…” Alex couldn’t explain the feeling of age in it, the weight of it against her palms as she had traced her fingers across the ancient parchment. 

“You… you touched it?” His voice was still that soft and low and there was disbelief there that was far different from the certainty of his skepticism. It was more personal, and more raw. Strand himself could hear it, and he hated himself for it. 

“Yes.” The word was said simply, and there was the same sort of honesty in it. “I touched it. It was…” Alex fumbled around for the proper words for how it felt to touch the parchment and the soft thrum of age and power that she could feel etching itself against her skin as she trailed her fingers across it. 

Strand didn’t let her have time to finish, instead she could hear the curiosity losing to the anger in his voice. “If you have pictures does that mean that Simon did not let you leave with actual horn itself? Don’t you think that convenient, Alex? The one piece of evidence that would presumably tell us if this was complete bullshit or not is of course not something you could take with you to authenticate it either via carbon dating or some other sort of artifact manner?”

“No, I don’t think it’s convenient at all as a matter of fact!” Alex’s voice was sharper than she normally would have wanted it to be, the drive and the tiredness and the hunger coming roaring back with a ferocity that was only matched by strand’s anger at the situation. “I think what he meant by not letting me take it with him was that he was concerned for my safety.”

“Concerned for your safety?!” The words were a snide bite, Richard’s anger overcoming things once again, “you cannot be serious right now. Well I suppose we should all be glad that at least one of you does in fact put your safety above that of the story! Ironic that it’s someone who has admittedly killed people including his parents that is concerned about your own personal safety. Let all of our stalkers have the same good taste as Simon!” He was practically roaring by the last bit, picturing Alex’s already pale face even paler as she lay on a cold slab. 

For a second her own answer was a sigh. “Richard, I’m sorry. I should have told you that I was going before I went. In person.”

“But you’re not sorry enough not to do it again, are you Alex. Not sorry enough to promise that the next time he calls you you won’t go running to wherever stupid place he wants you to go!”

“No Richard I am not going to promise that. You know I can’t!”

“Can’t,” his tone was a razor dragged against the raw nerves of her skin as he repeated her words flatly and then added, “I think you meant won’t.” 

“Fine! Won’t then! But no I’m not going to make a promise that I know I probably won’t be able to keep. There are some things that I know need to happen, Richard and that was one of them! But you know I didn’t do this just to go about hurting you, right?” When he was silent for too long Alex added quickly, “right?!”

“No, I don’t think you were doing it to hurt me at all. I’m not foolish enough to think that you considered my emotions in any context.” There was a quiet despair that mixed with the anger in what he said and somehow it made the poison in Alex’s gut all the more lethal for it. The combinations of the emotions involved were enough that it felt as if Alex had swallowed ground glass and it was tearing her apart on the inside. 

“Richard.” His name was a sighed breath that reminded both of them too much of intimacy between them. “I am sorry.” 

He wanted to believe her then. Maybe believe everything that went along with her voice and the tone in it. But Richard Strand knew better than most people that believing in something didn’t mean that it solved anything. So, there was nothing to do but to cut her off before she made the situation somehow worse. “When will you be home?” The word had more weight in his head than he wanted to, and Richard was keenly aware of how when he pictured her at home, he clearly pictured her here at his father’s house. 

It wasn’t a thought that bared repeating or reflection but he was Richard Strand and he knew where the folly at the end of that road ended up. 

“The day after tomorrow. I mean I wanted to make sure that I had time enough to deal with what Simon wanted…”

“So you structured a multiple day trip around the whims of a madman?! Alex.” He didn’t need to say anything else. His tone spoke enough of the tired anger and desperation within him. So he added, “text me your information for your flight. I’ll pick you up at the airport.”

“Richard…” he didn’t let her get more than that out. 

“And you will text me every hour you are there and awake, Alex. It’s clear someone needs to look after your safety if you won’t.”

“I am not a child, Strand. I don’t need someone to look after my safety!” The angry note in her voice responded discordantly to the forced calmness of his own. 

Though some of his famous control slipped and he couldn’t help but snap: “I would suggest some sort of GPS tracker inserted to you when you sleep, Alex, but unlike one of us I do actually have some concept of boundaries.” 

“That is not fair! You’re trying to treat me as if you’re my father, Richard, and that’s not fair and not going to work. I don’t deserve that!” Alex left out the part about why his treating her like she was his daughter wasn’t okay with her. After all, he was already furious enough with her, and that wasn’t a conversation that they should have on the phone.

“Clearly you do. I’ll see you in two days at the airport. Otherwise I will be on the next flight to Istanbul. Goodbye Alex.” And before she could protest further, Richard just hung up on her and trusting in her anger, he ignored the rest the calls she made to him in the middle of the night. It was more well than eleven (and certainly not spaced out in anything close to the order that he'd demanded of her) and Richard wondered if that was a personal record for her. 

Pointedly, he didn’t think of why Alex was so offended he was acting like he knew better than she did, or at least like ‘a father.’ Those thoughts could come later, when she was safe. But as he drifted off into sleep, he felt certain that she was safe. At least for now, anyway. Perhaps between himself and Simon's concern she'd be safer than she'd been in a while. What happened later would be later, but she’d come home to him and things would be alright until the next stupid, reckless and impulsive thing that she did. 

She was Alex Reagan after all, and stupid, reckless, impulsive things without a sense of self preservation were just who she was. There was bound to be another one of them soon.


End file.
